The Season's a-Changin'

The season is a-changin' and I must be hankering to put on some fat because all I can think of to write about is food. And so here goes:

I made chopped bread a few weeks back for the first time in a decade or two. (Yessiree, I was baking as a toddler, that's right, uh-huh, yeah sure, you betcha!) At the time I would get the frozen bread dough from the store because my bread-making skills were somewhat hit or miss. Now perhaps I have more patience to let the yeasty beasts do their thing but still I have a breadmaker to make the dough for me. How much easier can it get? But still there is ample opportunity to screw things with a dash of impatience.

Essentially, chopped bread is a wad of bread dough that has been flattened out, filled with whatever goodies strike your fancy, rolled up, chopped up, and piled up on a tray, left to rise for an hour or so and then baked. My last two renditions have been pizza-ish in goodies because of a certain Kid's response to my decision to make pizza for dinner. "Fine!" I said, "It's not pizza, it's chopped bread." And I proceeded to take the pizza toppings and wrapped them up in the pizza dough, chopped it up and the end result disappeared so thoroughly, I was taken aback. Resident Spouse provided the prized food rating of "Tasty!"

The Healthy Portion of Patience part of the recipe comes in during the final rising of the melange. If you cut this short, you get a doughy heavy mass, but a well-risen blob of bits and pieces becomes light and airy, even when using 1/2 whole wheat flour, like I usually do, and even when using potentially heavy ingredients like meat and cheese. The coup de grace can come in the form of providing a dipping sauce of marinara or whatever goes with the fixin's in which to plop tasty bits of pulled apart bread with goodies.

I have to admit that I am limited by being tied to the breadmaker - it's hard to double the recipe for guests without the dough heaving out of the machine - but I'm thinking it might be fun to have multiple machines going at once and making a couple different varieties. And then there's the sweet versions...